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House Urged to Pass Child Nutrition Bill

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have urged lawmakers to act quickly on a bill they say will improve school meals.

In a joint statement Monday, Vilsack and Duncan highlighted opportunities for improving the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs through the child nutrition bill pending in the House.

The Senate has already passed the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill — called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act — which would make significant improvements to school lunch and school breakfast programs across the country. Last week more than 1,000 organizations from all 50 states — representing public health experts, private sector companies, and faith-based and anti-hunger organizations — wrote to the House of Representatives urging passage of the legislation.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, would:

• Increase access to meal programs. Using Medicaid data, states will be able to directly certify children who meet income requirements without requiring individual applications and setting benchmarks for states to continually improve performance;

• Improve nutrition standards. Establishing improved nutrition standards for school meals based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and taking additional steps to ensure compliance with these standards and providing additional financial support in the form of reimbursement rate increases for schools that enhance nutrition and quality;

• Increase education about healthy eating. Providing parents and students better information about school nutrition and meal quality;

• Establish standards for competitive foods sold in schools. Creating national baseline standards for all foods sold in elementary, middle, and high schools to ensure they contribute effectively to a healthy diet;

No where in the article is there any indication of the how, where and when funding will be provided to support these programs. The free and reduced per meal financial support has, in real dollars, continued to decline. The challenge, among several others, for school lunch programs is how to make all of this magic work with little or no money. The current political mood regarding worthy project funding does not bode well for this and related initiatives.

Pat Zaudke

Hi Senator Cornyn,
Strange you don’t remember, seeing as the bill came out of your Ag committee this Spring. The increased funds in the bill are completely paid for by cutting other programs within USDA.
Pat

Sandy

the Florida legislature just passed a new law that requires Florida Public Schools to use fresh local food in school lunches here. Get rid of those canned peaches in syrup. (from Mexico), hey after all this is Florida and we have fresh peaches right here…
i see that they are going to vet the kids directly, thats a good thing because many parents won’t fill out the forms to allow free meals for their children, they just send them to school without a lunch or any money. Parents like these burn me up.
We really need to make our chidrens school lunches more nutricious and wholesome, they could stand a great improvement.